Sunset on Manhood - Process

1. In Manga Studio, I start with a very rough sketch with big fat pencils. The fat pencils force me to keep the sketch loose without getting too caught up in the details. I worked a lot from reference photos of people running to get a good variety of poses.

2. Final sketch. Now I go back and do a more detailed sketch, working out the the bodies, clothing, and hair. The tricky part is positioning the silhouettes just right so that I can include key bumps and details to make each character's clothing recognizable where it won't be completely obscured by another character. Plus, it's just hard, as an artist, to allow the characters to overlap and lose details that I liked drawing. Sure, I could just make them run in single file but then it wouldn't look natural and dynamic.

3. Inking. Since this will all be silhouettes, I used a constant-width brush for almost every outline, switching to a variable-width inking brush just for the sharpest points (such as the tips of hair). I export the characters and the groundline as seperate laters.

4. In Photoshop, I completely fill in the silhouettes with black and combine them.

5. I want to add some grass to the ground so I make a new grass brush. This one is just for silhouettes so I made a curvy version on the top and less curvy version on the bottom and then I let the brush us flipping so it's like two types of grass. Add in some size and angle jitter, widen the spacing, and I have something I can use.

6. Along the groundline, I use my new grass brush to fill in some grass, making it denser in some places, thinner in others. Too much constancy in the density can make it look unnatural.

7. For the sky itself, I add gradients of peach, orange, and light purple, all sampled from photographs of a sunset.

8. The sun is very simple. I added a little white circle and gave it an outer glow effect, using a gradient glow with white at the center and fading to transparent bright yellow on the outside. For the lens flare effect, I opened a new, square image, made it all black, add a thin white gradient at the top, then pulled some vertical streaks down from the white so it looks kind of like the top of a drippy paint can. Then I apply the distort filter for polar coordinates to turn into a lens flare. Copy it over to my picture and set it to color dodge on top of the sun and it gives the sun a nice flare.

9. I want to try something new with painting clouds so I made a new cloud brush. I started with a photograph of some clouds and just picked on little section of one cloud. Something with some variation but not too much. I made the whole image greyscale, used levels to push it to stark black and and white, blurred it a fair amount, then blacked out everything but the little bit of cloud I wanted to use. Then I inverted the image so it was like black clouds in a white sky, selected the bit for the cloud, and made it into a brush. I gave the brush a lot of angle jitter and flip, a medium amount of size jitter, and used pen pressure to control flow with a little bit of jitter. You can sample my cloud brush from this image if you want.

10. Using my new cloud brush, I used a peachy mid-tone, sampled from a photograph of clouds at sunset, and blobbed in some clouds, keeping it wispy at the top, very thick and opaque in the middle. I used a simple soft round eraser to chop off the bottoms so that they would be flat on the bottom edge like a big, heavy cumulus cloud. I used four layers for clouds so that I could keep overlapping clouds in seperate layers.

11. Now I lock the color of each layer (it's the little square checkerboard lock button for the layer) which makes it so that you can repaint the color of the pixels in that layer but the transparency of each pixel can't be changed. Using colors sampled from the sunset photograph, I used my cloud brush to add some yellow along the top edges facing the sun, then used darker purple to fill most of the cloud away from the sun. Then I used a light purple between the remaining peach and the dark purple, and to add more detail to the clouds.

12. Put it all together and I'm done!